The Eating the Dragon series combines the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) word lists with a modern supplemental vocabulary, expands individual characters not in the HSK lists, and presents it all in frequency order according to an extensive corpus of modern informational Chinese. Picking up where other frequency-based approaches leave off, this volume presents readers with a progressive approach to acquiring new vocabulary in which each lesson builds upon characters learned in previous lessons. Supplemental vocabulary has been selected to be appropriate to the level of each lesson as well.
Volume 1: Elementary and Intermediate includes 2,874 HSK level 1 (A1 Elementary) through 4 (B2 Intermediate) and supplemental characters, words, and phrases in 47 lessons.
Volume 2: Advanced I includes 2,922 HSK level 5 (C1 Advanced) and supplemental characters, words, and phrases in 51 lessons.
Volume 3: Advanced II includes 5,974 HSK level 6 (C2 Advanced) and supplemental characters, words, and phrases in 100 lessons.
Errata
The data table summarizing the ETD lessons (third page of the introduction) contains the following errors:
The numbers for Volume 3 (HSK Level 6, C2 Advanced) should be as follows: HSK Vocab, 2,359; Total, 5,973.
For the Totals row: HSK Vocab, 4,301; Total 11,769.
Downloads
Note: All text downloads, including files contained in ZIP archives, are UTF-8 encoded.
hsk-terms.txt (315 kB) contains a list of all HSK terms in a single comma-separated file. Each record contains the HSK level, Chinese characters, Pinyin pronunciation, and English definition (based upon CC-CEDICT).
lessons.zip (590 kB) contains the full contents of all 198 ETD lessons, one lesson per UTF-8 encoded text file, grouped by HSK level.
character-index.txt (325 kB) contains the complete character index.
lesson-statisics.txt (11 kB) contains a summary of the number of characters, HSK terms, and non-HSK terms for each of ETD's 198 lessons.
ngrams.txt (2.4 MB) contains a list, arranged by relative frequency, of 60,864 n-grams that were evaluated in order to compile the ETD lessons.
Print Version
The books are currently out of print, but you can download the contents in PDF format below.
Volume 1, Lessons 1–47 (PDF, 3.6 MB)
Volume 2, Lessons 48–98 (PDF, 3.7 MB)
Volume 3, Lessons 99–198 (PDF, 5.2 MB)